How I Make Money Online: CGM Technologies

It’s time for that obligatory post of all “Make Money” sites, showing you how much they earned the previous month.  As much as it tends to seem like bragging for some people, it’s a great way for everybody out there to see the people taking their own advice and performing the work that they’re talking about on their own sites.

Last month ended up being a decent month overall.  I sold my proxy network, as well as a few other sites that I had started building over the last month.  I realized that I didn’t have much time to work on them, and also that I probably wouldn’t be able to maximize their potential, so I decided to sell them off.  All those sales brought in about $325 for the month. 

I also built a couple ebay sites, earning me another $80.

My affiliate earnings were entirely from Commission Junction, which did quite well for the first 2 weeks of the month.  I didn’t earn anything after that for some reason, but I did pull in just over $30, meeting my goal to beat last month’s earnings.  I also received my check from January, which was a nice gift.

My adsense earnings for the month were pretty good too, since my proxy network started to really perform right before I sold it.  I even had one day that earned over $3, which completely surprised me.  The month ended with about $32 in my Adsense account, so I also succeeded in beating last month’s earnings as well.  On another note, I got my first Adsense check yesterday.

 With those results for February, it’s going to be tough to top it in March.  I’ve trimmed off all of my extra sites, so I’ll need to come up with some more ideas for sites to flip.  Those are now averaging $50 per site, which is pretty nice.  I also built up a new proxy site and did some promotion on it.  The major promotion went out today, so I’m hoping it will start earning me up to $1 per day, but we’ll have to see.  I’m going to give it a week before trying out another promotion tactic or two.  In the next couple weeks, I should know exactly how each promotion has affected the site, and be able to just use the most beneficial ones for new sites.  In the end, I want to be able to build a proxy site and promote it to $1 per day earnings in less than a month for under $15 - $20.  I don’t see this as being too difficult, and if I can do this 2 - 3 times per month then I will be able to earn an extra $60 - $100 in Adsense each month.  Just 3 months of this and then that’s my car payment, so it’s something I’m really hoping to see happen.

I also have my ebay sites running still, and plan on starting to try making them better with a few articles on each site, and even working on a press release or two for each one.  This will work to make the sites more relevant to Google, and should help them rank higher to bring in more organic traffic.

I’ve also been looking more at affiliate marketing, using PPC to drive the traffic.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough money to start up accounts in Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft, but I did find a $75 Microsoft Adcenter voucher here, and it only costs $5 to create your account.  I have learned that the traffic from Adcenter tends to convert really well, so I’m hoping that it should be a great way to start out.  I’ve recently earned some money from a programming job, so I also plan on starting up an Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing account soon, after I find some good vouchers for them too.

As always, my goals for the next month are to earn more than the previous month.  I don’t consider website sales and programming in these goals, only income that is earned without my work, from Adsense and Affiliate Marketing.  My other goal is to make at least 2 conversions from Adcenter.  I am currently promoting an offer that earns $40 per sale, so if I can get 2 sales this month without spending more than my $75, then it’s going to be considered successful.

Well, I stopped getting my Adsense earnings from the first of my ClassHelper Proxy Networks that I sold for a nice chunk of change.  It was really fun watching the earnings go from $.14 to $1.50, then $2.00, then top off right above $3 in one day.  I’m now back down to $.03 earnings today, which is actually kind of depressing.  I earned a nice $1.10 off one click yesterday, but today just isn’t very good.  The good thing, however, is that my traffic is starting to increase to the proxy site, and I still have it being sent out in a newsletter on 3/2.  Until then, I just have to wait.  I don’t really have any more money in my Paypal to build any more sites or buy promotion, since I finally treated myself to a few things, but I have 2 high-dollar programming gigs that I’m working on.  I’m going to focus my time on those, and work on getting a little more money together.  Once I finish that work, then I’ll probably work on building about 3 or 4 more proxy sites, and then work on what I believe is going to be my major money-maker.  Actually, I have 2 things that I believe will earn me the majority of my money this year.  One is a membership site, but I haven’t worked out all the details yet.  I’m also planning on getting into Affiliate Marketing.  After reading up on several blogs, this proves to be something that can really take you places, if you dedicate the time and money to learning how to do it effectively.  In fact, the guy over at uberaffiliate.com recently posted regarding his one year anniversary in affiliate marketing.  In one year, he went from $0 to over $500,000 per month in earnings.  Now, this is where I want to be.  Yes, you can earn great money from proxy sites, and from website flipping, and even Adsense, but how many people who do that stuff full-time can say they earn 1/2 a million dollars per month?  Not that many.  I have a couple checks coming in that I plan to use to start out with my affiliate marketing business.  I will try and update things here, passing on little tidbits of information that I uncover along the way.  There’s no reason that anybody can’t make obscene amounts of money online, if they just put their mind to it.

Well, as 90% of the other online marketers will do, I’m placing a record of my earnings for January online. January was a great month for me, as I met every one of my goals for the month. Granted, I don’t set my goals too high yet, but the main premise is to grow my earnings every single month. I’ve been successful in doing that except for one month, I think it was October. Anyway, without further ado, here goes.

$30.35 - Adsense Earnings

$21.21 - Ebay Sites (GucciGallery, etc…)

$100 - Affiliate Earnings (Web Hosting Sale)

$42.90 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10Cents.com - One Aff Site)

$14.2 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10Cents.com - Won’t get this money until the account gets to $50)

$14.75 - Affiliate Earnings (Earn10cents.com - Another Aff Site)

$185 - Sale of 2 Websites

$45 - Building Ebay Sites For People

$30 - PHP Repair Work For People

$75 - Freelance Web Programming

$10 - Moola.com

As you can see, I’ve had a really good month. Granted, I haven’t actually received all the money yet, but if I can keep the earnings consistent then the money will be too. My biggest bonus was the Adsense earnings. I’ve finally pushed over the $100 mark to be able to receive my check. I’m expecting that in the next couple months. Do you guys who actually read this blog like seeing the pictures of checks? Even the small checks? Leave a comment and let me know if they help motivate you, and I’ll make sure to take some as they come in. Anyway, my Ebay Sites are really taking off too. The last day of the month brought in a surprise $5.40 commission from one of them, which shot the total up by 30%. I have some work to do to the sites, because I changed a few things around on one of them and it has really helped it gain traffic and sales. I’m going to make the same changes on the others and watch the earnings just grow. Earn10Cents.com was an experiment for me in building and running an incentive site without shelling out the $150+ for a script. I built it on Wordpress and wrote a plugin that allowed me to track the leads through Commission Junction. I paid out approximately $30 in incentives, but at least $10 of that was for link building. That meant that about $20 in payments brought about $60 in earnings. The sites also brought in some really good Adsense earnings as well, helping me out by about $10 this month. I then sold the site for the most I’ve ever earned so far for a site. All together, this one site that I built earned me over $200 this month. I also get asked to do some PHP work for people that I have dealt with in the past. I’m slowly charging a little more for my services, and they’re gladly paying, so I’m realizing that I’m worth a lot more than I think. I don’t plan on raising my prices any more, though, as I think $15 for fixing a simple issue is a great balance. I do some contract work as well, which comes closer to paying me what I’m worth, but still pays well.

That’s it for the month of January. As always, my goals for this month are to exceed the previous month’s earnings. For affiliate commissions, I’m not planning on trying to beat that because I don’t have the power of an incentive site to help me, so my goal is to earn anything again. I have placed a few affiliate links nicely in my ebay sites, which means that if people click through them and make a purchase, I’ll actually earn more than if they buy through ebay. I’m expecting them to really help out with the earnings. I also built 6 new Ebay Sites, with 2 more left to create. 3 of them are real tight niches, africastamps.info, buyaustraliastamps.info, and buychinastamps.info. Another nice site that I built is buydinaronline.info. I’m hoping to start showing in the search engines real soon (2 already are after less than a week), to start ranking well, and to start getting some sales. Along with those sites, I threw up a couple anime related sites, because they seem to be extremely popular right now, and I’ll be more than happy to join the others making money from it. Animeauctions.info and buyanimedvd.info should really start bringing in some decent money by the end of the month.

I never know how to end these posts, so I’ll just leave you by wishing you the same success that I’m experiencing in my online business.

With 8 days to go, I’ve done very well this month and met all of my goals so far.

Adsense Goal:  Beat $20

Adsense Earnings: $23.12

Ebay Goal: Beat $12

Ebay Earnings: $12.26

Affiliate Goal: Anything

Affiliate Earnings: $ 142.91

Now, the Affiliate earnings had a little bit of help from yours truly.  I needed to get some more web hosting (a plan that allowed Cron Jobs), and felt that my best option would be to go with a different company for now, rather than my current host.  I didn’t want to lose the money that I had already paid in, so it just made sense.  Now, it also made sense to go through my affiliate link and purchase the plan.  I made $100 commission, and have a $9.95 hosting plan.  Not a bad deal, when you think about it.  Anyway, the rest of the Affiliate earnings was from Earn10cents.com, which I sold.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret if you’re into flipping websites.  Always, always, always put your Adsense code in every website that you sell.  You don’t know how many people are going to switch it right away, or ever, and you can still earn money from the site until that happens.  I have a few sites that still bring in a little bit here and there, and one that has still earned me about $5 since I sold it.

Not many people read this blog yet, so you privileged few who do, remember the above advice.

All successes so far, no failures.  That’s the way it should be, and this month is a wonderful start to the new year.  I was able to flip my site earn10cents.com, selling it for $150 on Namepros.  That site was live for about 2 - 3 weeks and earned me $50 from affiliates, plus about $5 through Adsense, and $150 on the sale.  That was a great earner, and really pumped me up for the year.  I’ve also earned about $8 from my ebay sites, and just have a few more bucks left to beat that goal.  My Adsense goal is well on the way to being met too.  I have averaged $1 per day through my whole network of sites, so I’m pretty sure that I’ll hit $30 for the month.

I’m also selling ProxyForSale.com, just because I don’t know how to get the traffic to it in order to make it successful.  I was hoping to get $50 - $75 for it, but it looks like I’m only going to make about $35 for it.  For the time involved to get it ready, it’s not quite worth it, but there’s nothing I can really do about it now.  I also created an automated wordpress site that sold very quickly for $25.  I’m thinking that may be the way to go, for a while. If I can create a few of those sites every few days then I can earn a fairly easy $300 - $400 per month.

I thought that now would be a good time to look at my earnings so far for the month, so here it is.

My Goals:

• Over $20 in Adsense
• Over $12 in Affiliate Earnings from Ebay
• Over $1 in other Affiliate Earnings

How am I doing so far?

My newest site, earn10cents.com has really been a great earner for me.  It takes about 20 - 30 minutes each day to run it and make payments.  I have earned $46 from affiliate sites, just from this one website.  I’m not sure how much I have paid out for it, though.  I will have to figure that out real quick, but I’m guessing it’s around $25.  That gives me a net total of around $20 from just one site.  I also earned $3.62 from an ebay sale the other day, but I’m not doing anything at the moment to actively promote those sites.  With the traffic to earn10cents.com and the traffic that I’m getting for ITxTU.info, my Adsense earnings are topping out at $8.47 at the moment.  If I can keep up these earnings, then I’m set to do about $25 - $30 this month in Adsense.  I’m considering selling my best performing site, however, because I’m not sure how much I want to be in the incentive site business.  The only difficulty, though, is that it does perform quite well, and I don’t know if anybody will actually want to pay me what the site is worth.  Oh well, if all else fails I can just ride it out for a couple months, earn some good money, then convert it to something else.  We’ll just have to see.

All in all, my earnings are on track and I’m extremely pleased with how things are going.

Well, December was pretty good overall for me.  My Adsense earnings came in at $20.62, which is $.62 over the adjusted $20 goal that I set mid-month.  About half of that was from ITxTu.info, and the majority of the rest was from my 6 proxy sites.  I did end up with a few dollars from the ads that are on my sites in the Shopping Network, too.  A surprise commission from my Coach site brought in an extra $9 on 12/28, which pulled my affiliate account balance up to almost $17.  It’s not enough to cash out, but it IS enough to tell me that I’m on the right track with the sites.  I’m trying to not set up any more sites right now, and focus instead of the sites that I have.  I have worked on optimizing the GucciGallery site in order to pull in more visitors from the search engines.  I won’t know how my efforts pay off for a couple more weeks, though, so I have to keep track of everything that I do in order to duplicate on the other sites if needed.  I also need to do some promotion on my proxy sites.  They are proven earners, but need to get more than my average of 3 or 4 visitors per day in order to really make it.

I also did some programming work in December, which brought in a couple hundred dollars, but that money went for some Christmas gifts, as well as more things to build my business.

My goals for January, 2008?  Well, my standing goal is to beat my Adsense earnings from the previous month.  This carries over to my affiliate earnings as well.  Therefore, I need to earn more than $21 from Adsense, and more than $12 from Affiliate Sites.  My affiliate earnings primarily come from Ebay right now, so I’ll break up that goal even further.  I want to earn more than $12 from my ebay affiliate sites, and then earn basically anything from the other affiliates.  I also plan to do more programming work, but I won’t figure that into my goals.  These goals will be an effort to build ongoing income, so my business can keep growing each month.

How do I plan to achieve these?  As mentioned before, I’m going to work on optimizing my sites that I currently have.  It’s going to be easier and much cheaper to double the amount of visitors that I have now, instead of building more sites.  I’ll go through each site and mention my plans.

-http://itxtu.info : I recently converted this to a wordpress site, in order to take advantage of the SEO benefits.  I’m going to create a list of long tail keywords and make individual posts targetting every single one.  This should bring in more visitors from the search engines.  I also plan to add an address book to the sidebar, so it’s easy to send text messages to your friends.  This functionality is expected to bring in more repeat visitors.

-http://webportinc.com : I’m just using this site in pretty much the same way as the site that you’re currently on.  There isn’t any advertising, it’s mainly there to have an authority site with some pagerank.  I don’t know what I’m going to do in order to get it to bring in some money.

-http://proxyforsale.com : I built this as an auction site for buying/selling proxy sites.  I need to figure out how to market it effectively, though.  It’s built on PHPBB Forum, so I’m thinking about starting the forum up instead, and showcasing the auction part of it after the forum is up and running.

-http://earn10cents.com : This site was built to give me an easy to use Incentive site.  It takes a little longer than I had thought it would to make the payments and stuff, but I may be able to program something in there to make things easier.  It’s built on Wordpress, and I can customize the hell out of it, so I’m not worried.  I’ve already started earning some decent money from here, by paying $.10 for something that earns me $.25.  It’s a win-win-win, so we’re all happy.  I also have a decent amount of backlinks being placed, as another $.10 incentive, so the traffic should start increasing exponentially soon.  I don’t care about getting PR or anything from the backlinks, I’m just after the exposure.  My biggest problem with this site is going to be keeping my paypal account funded so I can make the payouts.  This isn’t a problem yet, though, and my first payment will be coming in after a couple weeks, so I’m not worried.

-Proxy sites : I’m going to work on promoting my proxies now.  I don’t know how, yet, but I’m going to go through some ebooks that I have and see what is recommended.  There are people making $150+ per month from a small proxy network, and there’s no reason I can’t get up to that point.

-Ebay Affiliate Sites : These sites are the ones in my sidebar that say “Shopping Sites”.  Some of them aren’t going to earn much, but some of them are going to earn a ton.  My goal is to get them all to their maximum potential.  Through SEO and other various promotions I’m going to start increasing traffic to them.  I will focus more on the exact details at webportinc.com .

-http://todays-info-site.com : This site has been a few different things throughout it’s life, and is currently a video site.  My tasks with this site are to consistently add GOOD videos to it, which should help the traffic increase on its own.  These sites can be great earners, if the care is put into the sites.

I think that pretty much sums up the sites that I have.  There may be a couple that I forgot about, but those above are the primary sites in my portfolio.  They are very diversified, which is good, but almost present a little too much work for me at times.  Anyway, good luck with your own businesses and Happy New Year.

Yesterday’s killer earnings (for me, anyway) of over $2 just brought me shy of my Adsense goal for the month.  I found out that the reason my earnings for the last few days were so low was that my proxy sites were completely down for about 3 days.  They came back up yesterday, though, and started earning again.  They still aren’t bringing in much, though, with the majority of my money coming in from ITxTU.info.  That site had brought in $9.52 so far this month, and if I’m lucky, I’ll break $10 from this one site alone.  It’s hard to believe that it’s actually bringing in half of my Adsense income, just that one site.  I’ve been thinking about how to make that site even better, so it can bring in more money.  I think that putting wordpress up and maybe using it for the site might help with SEO.  Wordpress is very good for SEO, so that’s something that could help out.  If I don’t do that, then I’m going to just switch over to a cleaner, simpler template.  It would be awesome if I can get another $5 - $10 from that single site next month.

Well, it seems like one thing that happens when you own proxy sites at Christmas time is that kids no longer need to use proxies.  This causes a decline in Adsense earnings from proxy sites.  I thought I might be able to actually hit $20 this month, but I don’t believe that’s going to be the case any more.  I should hit $15, though, which still beats my earnings for any month so far.  I think that now I need to start focusing on changing my plans, and trying a different approach to building my business.  I have just a couple more websites that I need to finish making, then I’m going to focus my efforts on doing some articles to promote the sites that I have.  If I can get them to show up well in the search engines, then I know I’ll start getting some really good results.

Well, this is slowly turning into a successful Adsense business.  I’m not making much yet, but it’s a start.  I have passed my highest month’s earnings by at least $1, bringing in a total of $13.52 for this month so far.  I feel that this is decent, considering 56 clickthroughs.  ITxTU.info is still the major earner of the month, bringing in around $6 - $7 so far.  I really need to work on getting some more traffic to this site.  Article marketing might be a good way to do this, as well as some link building tactics.  All but about $2 of the rest of the earnings has come from my new proxy sites that I’ve built this month.  Once I start getting some more traffic to them, I really see them taking off as well.  As you can see, the biggest thing with any site is traffic.  Even the best site is worthless, unless you can get the traffic to it.